“Doctor, I see ads when watching Youtube videos on Youtube.” “Well then don’t watch them on Youtube.”

I’ve been fiddling with uBlock ever since putting it into medium mode and switching over to Firefox. It’s working well for me, but Youtube ads it still can’t seem to deal with. Even though I hadn’t seen those in years! A proper solution seems far away. But I have something even better: a media player.

Media players have been able to do this for a while now, loading a stream from a URL. Guess what? That can work for Youtube content too. But copy-pasting URLs all the time? That’s too inconvenient.

Instead, I whipped up this little thing to turn all Youtube video URLs into clickable application links for my media player of choice. (IINA is nice.) Click, watch in the player, and then back into the browser we go. It’s actually smoother performance, too.

I really should just use the Youtube API to get me a list of my subscriptions, and then I can abandon the website altogether.
~ Fang

Ghostery has been confirmed to sell user data, fyi.
Generally, you can never be too fortified on the current web. But past a certain point you’re trading in performance for practically zero additional benefit.